I knew a podiatrist named Dr. Toesy and an anesthesiologist/pain specialist named Dr. Payne.
Untold Stories of the ER features a Dr. Bob Slay.
He goes by Dr. Bob.
Another example of this occurred with airplanes in WWII. Engineers studied the planes that had been in combat to see where additional armor should be added. They found that there were certain areas of the plane which seemed to have more bullet holes than other areas. So they added armor to those areas.
Then somebody realized they were only studying the planes that made it back to the airfields. There were other planes which got shot down. And the engineers realized those areas on the plane which they had been ignoring were not immune to enemy gunfire; they were instead the areas which were most likely to result in the plane’s loss if they were hit by gunfire. So armor was added to those areas and more planes began returning to the airfields.
You see this in AI-generated art where the program will add things that no artist would (unless they were going for a surrealist effect). I saw an AI-generated photo-realistic image of a campsite - in which the campfire was located inside the tent.
Dalhart, Texas, is located in the extreme northwestern area of the Panhandle. It is closer to six other state capitals than it is to its own state capital of Austin.
It is 562 miles from Austin to Dalhart.
263 miles from Santa Fe, NM, to Dalhart.
313 miles from Oklahoma City, OK, to Dalhart.
349 miles from Denver, CO, to Dalhart.
448 miles from Cheyenne, WY, to Dalhart.
461 miles from Topeka, KS, to Dalhart.
543 miles from Lincoln, NE, to Dalhart.
I know a podiatrist called Dr. Achille
I heard he’s a real heel.
When I was in college, I took a course from Professor Bland, his boss was Dean Dull,
OK, I’ll grant you that Brotherhood of Man featuring Tony Burrows (wiki spelling) had just the one hit, but the (manufactured) band are still around to this day (no original members, obviously) and, over the years, have had a depressingly large number of hits - fifteen if you’re generous about territories. They even represented Britain in the Eurovision Song Contest, with the remarkably awful Save Your Kisses For Me (number one in five countries, god help us).
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Not engineers. Mathematician Abraham Wald.
The problem of armoring planes is assigned to Wald. Along with the assignment, he is given a fair amount of statistical data regarding aircraft damage, for example the location of damage from hits by enemy aircraft. It happens that most of the damage is located on the fuselage and very little in the area around motors, and the military is expecting to add armor to the fuselage, where the density of hits is highest. “Not so fast,” said Wald. “What you should really do is add armor around the motors! What you are forgetting is that the aircraft that are most damaged don’t return. You don’t see them. Hits by German shells are presumably distributed somewhat randomly. The number of damaged motors you are seeing is far less than randomness would produce, and that indicates that it is the motors that are the weak point.” The advice is taken, and in fact Wald’s techniques for interpreting aircraft damage statistics continue through two later conflicts.
But since we’re on the Dope, I’m afraid that the story of how Wald did it has been somewhat fictionalized. The American Mathematical Society has the story (and that quote) and some cold water to throw on it and tons on math for thems as like math. It still gives Wald lots of credit for the technical papers he wrote, but not a cute story like the one above that I’ve read many times and always believed.
Another learning moment from YouTube. This time from Anton Petrov who normally does Astronomy stuff but sometimes branches out. A recent video talks about some molecular chirality stuff (left-right orientation). Along the way he mentions the two types of Thalidomide. One is the Bad One for pregnant women and the other isn’t. Standard production of the drug produces both. There’s no point in making just the one since a. the body can switch the chirality either way and b. the harmless one doesn’t do anything good.
(“Is it just me” or is his signoff kinda creepy?)
I saw a demonstration of that in a video from the Great Courses on biochemistry for dummies, or some such. There’s a pinch-point in the molecule where this happens. Most curious.
IIRC, chirality of organic molecules was first studied in connection with an acid found in wines: One chirality tastes good, and the other tastes bad, and over time, wines tend towards a 50-50 mix of the two.
Can’t remember what the compound is called, though.
Perhaps what you’re thinking of was Louis Pasteur’s work with tartaric acid and racemic acid. Tartaric acid solutions will rotate polarized light, while the otherwise chemically identical racemic acid doesn’t. Pasteur demonstrated that racemic acid was actually a mixture of tartaric acid and its l- counterpart. Isaac Asimov wrote an essay about this, “The 3-D Molecule”, collected in The Left Hand of the Electron.
While reading about historical antecedents to certain current events which will remain undiscussed out of respect for the forum, I learned yesterday that the American government ran a massive project to deport Mexicans back in the 1950s which had a truly unfortunate official name.
Here is a relevant article, where that name appears neither in the headline nor the preview paragraph. Click through for more information. Warning for offensive language.
Troubling and disturbing … and nevertheless interesting.
When looking up something else, I learned that Rudolf Diesel, inventor of the engine that bears his name, disappeared while on a ship crossing the English Channel in 1913. He was 55 years old.
Also, the fuel which powered the first Diesel engine was peanut oil.
My dad like cars. However, he doesn’t really know much about them. To be more precise, he thinks he knows more than he does – a common affliction among American men. When I was growing up, he would make the occasional comment about high-octane fuel being “jet fuel.” Example: when he bought a Lexus that required premium fuel he lamented that he’d have to buy “jet fuel” for it.
Recently I stumbled upon the random (well, random to me, not random to people who actually need to know this) fact that jet fuel, diesel, and kerosene are basically the same fuel – at least, they have similar octane ratings (or would, if an octane rating for these fuels were a thing). There are differences: jet fuel has additives that help it lubricate better and not gel in sub-zero temps, kerosine also does not gel as easily in the cold, and diesel has some lubricants that kerosene doesn’t have but different than the ones found in jet fuel and etc. But my dad was certainly wrong about the perceived octane rating of jet fuel, which makes sense considering that jet engines use compression of the fuel vapor mix for ignition, as do diesel engines.
Aviation gasoline, the stuff that WW2 fighters and bombers ran on, is ultra-high octane because those are piston engines. Jets and turboprops use the modern jet/diesel/kero. In fact aviation gas is among the last holdouts of leaded fuel because it’s genuinely needed in that application, in far fewer vehicles than automobiles and the exhaust is more dispersed.
isn’t it a fact that the higher octane rating of fuel, the higher its resistence to ignite? … sounds counterintuitive, but is relevant in the context of “knocking”, i.e. uncontrolled self ignition in an engine.
Sorta… a gasoline with a higher octane rating means said fuel has a higher resistance to self-ignition under pressure. Since diesel and jet engines both use compression to ignite the fuel mixture rather than a spark plug, as a gasoline engine uses they both, by design, ignite well under pressure – the opposite of what gasoline is supposed to do.